The quiet war in Afghanistan

Photo: Nazeela Elmi

Click to read the article in Turkish

Peace should not be understood as quiet, and war should not be understood as the absence of quiet. We, the post-9/11 generation of Afghanistan, came to understand this more than ever in the last few weeks, when our country fell into the hands of the Taliban for a second time.

The harrowing quiet that sat on Kabul and swept through its streets and through all the streets across Afghanistan after it collapsed was not peace. It wasn't a peaceful quiet. It was a quiet of horror, of hiding from a brute force that had minced and slaughtered the bodies of young men, that gouged out the brain of Negar in front of her child for the crime of being a woman and a police officer.

War is not the absence of quiet, for the never-ending war that many believe has ended continues quietly. The war in Afghanistan has only changed its shape, not ended. This is a quiet war. This quiet, its subtle silences, can be very brutal, as we saw in the imposed media blackout on the valleys that were resisting. Those resisting were quietly massacred. The night raids, forced disappearances and extra-judicial killings all happen quietly. This is an Orwellian quiet we are experiencing, but it is not fictitious. The dystopia is real.

The heart of Kabul

The war didn't end. It started. It started when all my research papers about home and women's development became irrelevant, like the poems you write for someone you love that no longer serve a purpose when they are gone. A war on women started, when our images got removed from the streets, when the graffiti of ArtLords and Shamsia Hassani were painted white. When our sisters, mothers and aunts went into hiding, moving quietly from one not-so-safe house to another.

War started when the heart of Kabul was plucked out of its place in that sign of itself, like our own hearts were too. When "Big Brother" stole into our private lives and started monitoring men's beards and women's clothes, with its rules for men's appearance and women's disappearance. When a brother and sister were executed because they were thought to be lovers.

The world's silence

The quiet war came when we stopped hearing Aryana Saeed play on TV. When the Taliban killed women who protested in Badakhshan and the demonstrations against them quietly stopped. The quiet war had started.

Then there was another quiet, a deafening one. One that came from our friends. A quiet that we heard loud and clear from the whole world. A world that sat idly by while all of this happened, a world that chose to stay silent while we pleaded for over a year about an imminent war that would be waged against women, ethnic minorities, children and all human beings in Afghanistan.

A world that was too indifferent to stir from the comfort of its complacency to see us fall from an airplane or see the hundreds of dead bodies that filled the sewage canals around Kabul airport with blood. And the quiet war is constantly accumulating, so each thing it does sinks into oblivion in a matter of days.

Some silences can be very loud and the quiet we hear from our friends in times of hardship can only be violent, not tranquil. I studied Political Science and International Relations. When I attended my first IR lecture in 2017, the professor showed us a passage in Goethe's play "Faust" that read:

Another Citizen: On holidays there's nothing I like better
Than talking about war and war's display,
When in Turkey far away,
People one another batter.
You sit by the window: have a glass:
See the bright boats glide down the river,
Then you walk back home and bless
Its peacefulness, and peace, forever.

Third Citizen Neighbour, yes! I like that too:
Let them go and break their heads,
Make the mess they often do:
So long as we're safe in our beds.

Then we, the students, were told by the professor, this is why we have IR and peace theories, that the world is no longer the world described by Goethe here. Quite contradictorily, in these few lines, I felt inspired. I had found my true purpose in studying IR, in the interconnectedness of the world. The fact that a war in one region would affect peace in another. Just like the poem by Sa'adi I was taught in elementary school:

Human beings are members of a whole
In creation of one essence and soul
If one member is afflicted with pain
Other members uneasy will remain

Now, with the same soul-crushing indifference as in Faust, it has all become irrelevant. The war and mayhem in my country has become no more than an idle spectacle, if that, for the world to watch, if at all, for a perfunctory discussion as people walk home at the end of the day to the peace and safety of their beds. The world seems to have gone through a paradigm shift backwards in its understanding of morality, war and peace.

The uncertain future

I write this after going mute for several days after the collapse of my motherland, my Afghanistan, losing any sense of purpose and feeling helpless in the face of everything we have lost. At the same time, I hope in writing it I am not doing any injustice to those who actually did stand by us. I am, we are haunted by the quiet war. I am tormented by so many silences.

I am haunted by the silence of the social media accounts of so many activists that continue to stay deactivated, by the silence of my friends who have fallen voiceless. All this as my aunt, one of the loudest women in her community, stood still in the street and couldn't shout out against the staged pro-Taliban demonstrations, as we have lost count of the days of not hearing from journalists who were arrested by the Taliban, as we stifle our cries watching another historical site get destroyed, as women are whipped on the street, confined at home and have all their rights stolen from them, as people are driven from their homes, as hundreds are still trapped, waiting to be saved, as one of my cousins was told the Turkish program he had received a scholarship for has been cancelled and as I and many other Fulbright semi-finalists wait for an email, for the uncertainty of our futures to unfold and for at least one of the many silences to end...

(NE/VK)